DAVOS, May 25 (AFP) - Ukraine's foreign minister said on Wednesday (May 25) his country "badly" needed multiple launch rocket systems to match Russian firepower as he pressed Western allies for heavy weapons at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he had come to Davos at a "very difficult moment on the frontline" as fighting rages in the eastern Donbas region.

"The battle for Donbas is very much like the battles of the Second World War," Kuleba told journalists following talks with a slew of government officials and business leaders.

"Some villages and towns, they do not exist anymore," he said.

"They were all turned into rubble by Russian artillery fire, by Russian multiple launch rocket systems. It's devastating."

Russia overwhelms Ukraine in a number of heavy weapons, but the biggest imbalance is with MLRS, mobile batteries of long-range rockets, he added.

Washington and European countries have poured billions of dollars' worth of arms into Ukraine to help the country's outgunned forces beat back the better-armed Russian invaders.

But Kuleba said that the MLRS "is really the weapon that we badly need.

"Those countries who are dragging their feet with the issue of providing Ukraine with heavy weapons, they have to understand that every day they spend deciding, weighing different arguments, people get killed."

Ukraine has asked Washington for the MLRS.